This book is the first collection of studies on Japanese modality written in English. It presents a review of Japanese modality studies as well as important new material that addresses the issues of its scope, its nature, and its conceptualization. The book offers specialists of Japanese a valuable tool to explore the broad range of perspectives adopted in a long tradition of scholarly inquiry on the subject, such as syntax, semantics, pragmatics, SLA, interaction analysis, in synchronic and diachronic, and comparative approaches.